Saturday, February 20, 2010

Discovery On Crete Shatters Science Dogma

Here's the usual, often repeated paradigm, unless you're a raving xtian lunatic that traces the bible begets back only 6,000 years.Human history is a slow, steady progression from ancient, dull witted proto humans to our exalted, high state of brainpower. So, you can say that the farther one travels back in time the cruder and less sophisticated human culture you'll find. This thinking permeates scientific, social, historical studies to the degree that anybody who ventures out of this box is discredited and ridiculed. One could portray advances in civilization with that way of thinking like this:

How we're supposed to view human progression, and any anomalous findings or data that doesn't fit this model is ignored and rejected. Humans have only been in the new world for 12,000 years, culture can be neatly divided into ages - bronze, iron etc, human settlement only began seven or eight thousand years ago and large bodies of water were impediments to travel until only recently. Well.

"Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected. That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures."

"Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa."

This is actually a really huge subject, way bigger and more complex than I could possibly get into here. We're going to have to get used to scientific paradigms being shattered left and right becaus the preponderance of evidence is too large to ignore. For way too long dogmatic approaches prevented serious study and contemplation of findings outside the box. Our history is far more involved and far more interesting than our gatekeepers would have us believe. Read Graham Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods" or "Underworld". Try Michael Cremo's "Forbidden Archeology".

Finding artifacts that disprove long believed assumptions about human history isn't news, the real news is that something like what's been discovered on Crete actually entered mainstream thought. To me, entertaining the ideas that Neanderthals rode horses or proto humans could build watercraft and could possibly navigate hundreds of miles are exhilarating thoughts. It would validate Hancock's contention that the vast oceans of this planet were never barriers to travel - they were highways.